Ubuntu Manpage: gitkeeper - Mirror files between git and an installed location.

NAME

       gitkeeper - Mirror files between git and an installed location.

SYNOPSIS

       gk [options] pull [host]

       gk [options] push [host]

       gk [options] export git-ref [host]

DESCRIPTION

       gitkeeper is a remote administration aid.  It enables configuration files to be maintained
       locally, with a full history of changes, and synchronised on demand with a remote target
       system.  This allows files to still be altered directly on the running system, if and/or
       when that is needed, with a simple method to get that all back in sync with the archived
       copy again later.

       It uses rsync(1) and ssh(1) for all operations on the remote hosts.  No special
       configuration beyond permission to use them is required.  The use of an ssh-agent for
       managing remote logins may be an advantage though.

       At its core, gitkeeper is really just a tool for managing bidirectional mirrors, of
       potentially sparse segments of the remote filesystem, so it's not strictly limited to
       being used for configuration files, nor is it strictly dependent upon git(1) aside from
       the export option, but those are the primary uses that it was initially designed for.

COMMANDS

pull Pull files from the remote system into the local mirror. This will update the
local directory content to match the live system, but it will not commit any files
to git or change the local index state in any way. If you wish to commit changes
imported in this way, you can just do that with normal git operations.

If the host parameter is not explicitly specified, then all defined hosts will be
pulled.

push Push files from the local mirror to the remote system. This will push the state
of the current working directory, regardless of whether the repository tree is
currently clean or dirty.

If the host parameter is not explicitly specified, then all defined hosts will be
pushed.

export Push files from a historical snapshot of the local mirror to the remote system.
This will do a git archive(1) export of the given git-ref to a temporary
directory, and then perform a push operation on that tree. It is equivalent to
doing a git checkout of the desired ref, and then doing a push on that tree state,
except it will respect any gitattributes you have set for what will be exported,
and it will not change the current working directory state.

If the host parameter is not explicitly specified, then all hosts defined in the
exported configuration will be pushed.

OPTIONS

-c, --config file
The file describing what should be mirrored and how. If not specified then
gk.conf will be looked for in the directory that gitkeeper is invoked in. Usually
this should be a relative path under that location, but an absolute path is
permitted and may be useful in some circumstances.

If the export command is used, then this file is not read until after the export
from git, and relative paths are resolved to files in the exported directory.
This is usually what you want since the configuration from the exported snapshot
will then be used. If you need to override that for some reason then you can use
an absolute path to an alternate configuration file.

-l, --list
Show the list of host aliases defined in the configuration file. If this is used
with the export command, then the configuration of the exported snapshot will be
shown.

--init Create a skeleton configuration file. This is a convenience to get an initial
configuration when bootstrapping a new mirror.

-C, --chdir directory
Change to the given directory before running gitkeeper. Normally you would just
run it from the top level directory of the mirror, but this permits use from
elsewhere in a similar way to what "make -C directory" allows.

--destdir directory
Prefix the remote paths to an alternate file system root. This always changes
only the remote path, regardless of whether a push or pull operation is being
performed. It acts like the "DESTDIR" option for "make install" and allows
mirroring files to and from an alternative filesystem location but with the same
subdirectory structure as what they would normally have.

You can use this to export files to a chroot, or to a temporary directory
somewhere, so that they can be examined without replacing the real files on the
remote system.

-u, --user
Override the remote_user option from the configuration file for access to the
remote host. There probably aren't many good reasons to ever use this option,
it's a pretty blunt hammer which will override it everywhere, but it may be useful
for exporting a mirror to some machine or location where it isn't usually expected
to go.

-n, --dry-run
Don't actually copy any files, just show what would be done if this was a live
run. If this is used with the export command, then the dry run will be performed
on the requested snapshot.

-v, --verbose
Show more detail about what is being done. This option may be passed multiple
times to increase the level of verbosity even further.

If passed along with --help then more verbose documentation will be shown.

-?, --help
Show this help, again.

CONFIGURATION

The gitkeeper configuration file is expected to contain a single JSON Object, which will
be parsed by perl's JSON::XS in its relaxed mode (which allows trailing commas after the
final element of an array or object, and '#'-comments anywhere that whitespace would be
permitted).

Global options
There is only one required member of the top level object, though other options may also
be specified there to be inherited as defaults if not overridden for a host or one of its
sync sets.

hosts The hosts member defines a JSON object in which each member is a host name alias
that may be passed as the host parameter to gitkeeper. The alias names are not
used for any other purpose than as the host identifier, and may be any JSON string
value. No other options may be included directly in the hosts section.

{
"hosts": {
"host1": { ... },
"host2": { ... }
}
}

Per-host options
There are two required members which must be specified directly for each host alias
object. Other options may also be specified there which will override a global default
for that host and be inherited as defaults for its sync sets, if not also overridden
there.

address The address member is a JSON string value, that defines the hostname or IP address
used when connecting to the remote system. It must be a valid string that can be
passed as the host part of a remote rsync(1) path. It should not contain a user
part (that should instead be set with the remote_user option), but may contain a
port specification.

sync The sync member is a JSON array of objects. It must contain at least one object,
but there is no upper bound to the number which may be included. Each of the
objects in the sync array define a mapping from a remote_root to a local_root, the
paths which will be mirrored under those roots, and the rsync options which will
be applied when transferring them.

"host1": {
"address": "myhost.mydomain.org",
"sync": [ { ... }, { ... } ]
}

Sync set options
Each object in the sync array has one required member that must be specified directly in
it. Other options may also be specified there which will override the global and host
defaults, and some of those options must also be defined in at least one of those places
for each sync set.

paths The paths member is an array of JSON string values which specify the files and/or
directories under the remote_root which will be mirrored with their full directory
structure. They may contain shell wildcards, but cannot contain brace expansions
if the rsync --protect-args option is used.

They must all be relative paths (ie. they must not begin with a '/').

"sync": [
{
"paths": [ "file1", "dir1", "dir2/subdir", "dir3/*.conf" ]
}
]

Required options
The following options must be defined for every sync set, though they may be configured in
either the top level object as global defaults, in the host alias object for per-host
defaults, or in the sync object itself.

local_root
A JSON string value that defines the local directory which remote paths will be
mirrored under. This must be a relative path, which itself is rooted to the
directory under which gitkeeper is invoked.

As a sanity check against accidents, this directory must already exist.

remote_root
A JSON string value which defines the location on the remote system that the
specified paths are relative to. This may be an absolute or relative path. A
relative path will be rooted to the home directory of the remote_user. A value of
"" may be used to specify the home directory of the remote_user.

Additional options
The following options may be defined as global or per-host defaults, or set explicitly in
each sync set. It is not an error for them not to be set, and a higher level default may
be 'unset' by overriding it with an empty value.

remote_user
A JSON string which defines the username to use for access to the remote host. If
not set, then the ssh default for the remote system will be used (as configured by
.ssh/config or similar).

rsync_opts
A JSON array of string values containing options to be passed to all invocations
of rsync, for both push and pull operations. No word splitting or shell quote
stripping is done on the values used here, so each option must be its own array
element.

Note that the --relative option is passed to rsync(1) by default for all
invocations and does not need to be included in this set. If you really don't
want that option for some reason, and understand the consequences of not passing
it for this use, you can disable it with --no-relative, but there's probably no
good reason to ever do that here.

"rsync_opts": [ "--prune-empty-dirs",
"--delete-excluded",
"--filter=protect .s[a-w][a-z]"
]

rsync_pull_opts
Similar to rsync_opts above, but options specified in this array are appended to
those only for pull operations.

rsync_push_opts
Similar to rsync_opts above, but options specified in this array are appended to
those only for push operations.

rsync_include
A JSON array of string values which will be passed to rsync(1) as --include
options. This is a convenience which is eqivalent to adding those to rsync_opts
ie. the following configurations would be identical in their operation if no other
ordering constraints for the filter rules applied.

"rsync_opts": [ "--include=.s[a-w][a-z]/" ]
"rsync_include": [ ".s[a-w][a-z]/" ]

rsync_exclude
A JSON array of string values which will be passed to rsync(1) as --exclude
options. This is the same as rsync_include above, except for excludes.

rsync_filter
A JSON array of string values which will be passed to rsync(1) as --filter
options. This is similar to the include and exclude options above, except it
allows the full range of rsync filter rules to be used.

rsync_pull_filter
A JSON array of string values which will be passed to rsync(1) as --filter options
(in addition to the include, exclude, and filter options above) only for pull
operations.

rsync_push_filter
A JSON array of string values which will be passed to rsync(1) as --filter options
(in addition to the include, exclude, and filter options above) only for push
operations.

chown A JSON string value which will be passed to rsync as the --chown option for push
operations to set file and directory ownership on the remote host. If this option
is used, the --owner and --group options will automatically added too, otherwise
it would have no effect. You must have superuser privilege on the remote host for
this to work.

"chown": "root:bind"

chmod A JSON string value which will be passed to rsync as the --chmod option for push
operations to set file and directory permissions on the remote host. If this
option is used, the --perms option will automatically added too, otherwise it
would have no effect. Valid values here are anything that the rsync option would
accept.

"chmod": "D2755,F664"

Pre- and Post- command hooks
The following options may be used to execute arbitrary commands before and/or after a pull
or push operation. The commands are executed on the local host, in the directory that
gitkeeper was invoked in, as the user which gitkeeper was invoked as. They can be used to
perform operations on the remote host by simply invoking ssh(1) or similar themselves.

pull_pre_command
push_pre_command
pull_post_command
push_post_command
A JSON array of string values containing the command to execute and the options to
pass to it. This will be passed as an array to the perl system() command, so if
the array contains multiple elements, then no word splitting or other shell
interpretation will be performed. If it is a single string, then it will instead
be passed to the local shell, with all the caveats that accompany doing that.

If the pre-command fails, then no transfer will take place. If the transfer fails
for some reason then the post-command will not be executed.

That might change later if we let this get more complex and begin passing status
and other variables to the commands that are invoked, but at this stage, that
isn't really needed for any current use we have, so I'm not going to complicate
things now in anticipation of what later uses might require.

FILES

       ./gk.conf
               The default configuration file.

AUTHOR

       gitkeeper was written by Ron <ron@debian.org>.